HotCat Report

September 9, 2012

After listening (with difficulty) to yesterday’s live-stream from Zurich, my first impression was that we had learned nothing new. On reading the subsequent report regarding the tests conducted on July and August at Bologna, I have to revise that assessment. I still feel that jubilation is premature – there are far too many questions and we need truly independent verification. This is not a criticism of those who conducted the tests but standard fare for such a contentious arena.

As I read the report, I could not help questioning the assumption that the inner surface irradiation would match the outer. It seemed obvious to me that it would not. Although this is addressed honestly in the errata and I am no expert, it is a perfect example of one issue that needs further investigation and an indicator pointing to potential unknown complexities that could smack us in the mouth later.

No-one should take these tests as proof. I would contend that the results are interesting and default to a respect for the engineers in question. I see no reason to doubt their integrity or expertise. We are all human, however, and it is easy to miss something that later becomes obvious.

I am encouraged that they released raw data and detailed information of the step-by-step process of the test. This will allow experts in the field to spot any problems and pin upper and lower bounds to the results. If these match the published results, we only have to worry about sleight-of-hand, mismeasurement or misplaced assumptions. That is a start.

That three engineers were willing to put their names on the line is encouraging but once more we need to remind ourselves to take one step at a time. Steorn did the same and as far as I can now tell, the company’s claims were nonsense.

I look forward to expert commentary on the results. If you do so here, we all appreciate your thoughts. I just ask you to leave the emotions at the door.

There are many things that puzzle me here (and raise red flags) and I have to admit that the gain in optimism (although real) is tempered by experience. I will look at these after today’s proceedings and following some time to reflect on them. For now, I welcome the report and hope we might get some more meat today.

88 Responses to HotCat Report

The report wouldn’t pass for a second semester homework test at any university I’ve ever been on. There seems to be no calibration. Who in their right mind would set up an experiment lasting months, introduce an IRCam and data logging and all that – and then DON’T perform a calibration??? This is not just an oversight. It is nothing where you can say “oh, yeah, but at this power level it doesn’t matter”. It is absolutely essential and it is relatively easy. It is absolutely required to understand whether the whole jumble of rules of thumb used to calculate this and ignore that and subtract the other thing is even half way correct and leads to results somewhere near the right order of magnitude.

There is one open question I can (if sufficiently drunk) probably see in favor of Rossi about this report: Rather than putting out something so obviously and fundamentally flawed – why didn’t he just fake it convincingly?

I mean calibration of the entire setup by performing proper control experiments with blank runs. It is inconceivable why they wouldn’t check their wildassed guesswork by simply running the test without triggering “the reaction” (unless, of course, there is no reaction anyway).

Can’t comment on the emissivity issue since I don’t even understand where the reaction is supposed to take place and where the heater is located.

Dear Jami,
1- There is no reaction whatsoever ^^
2- To my understanding, you don’t need to know the details of how the pipe is built. You just need to know that there’s a heater inside (you can see the coils in one picture) and you need to know the material of which (a thick enough portion of) the outer surface is made in order to find the emissivity, plus, of course, you need the area and temperature of the outer surface.

Warm Regards,
123star

Jami

September 9, 2012 at 2:00 pm

Maybe I just don’t get your point. Where exactly would they use a (hidden) low emissivity coating and what would it achieve?

123star

September 9, 2012 at 3:25 pm

@Jami
I remind you that the external stainless steel pipe is painted! You only need to paint the external surface of your radiating object.

In the Hotcat report it is written:

e = normal emissivity, supposed to be = 1 only for the purpose of the initial calculation. The result may be adapted to paint emissivity, which is estimated at 0.96

Do you really trust this estimate? This is crucial and can be easily faked.

If you are not convinced that the external coating matters, maybe this will help.
Do you know about low emissivity coatings for windows? They act as reflectors for the IR spectrum, so they impede heat transfer through IR rays. They keep your room warm in the winter, and sun rays will not heat much your room in summer.
The coating can be very thin (read for example the first lines of http://www.efficientwindows.org/lowe.cfm).

Typically, conductors are good reflectors of course.

The thickness needed to reflect must be greater or comparable to the radiation length in the wave band of interest. For example, you can’t easilly reflect X-rays.

Jami

September 9, 2012 at 4:18 pm

“Do you really trust this estimate?”

Of course not. However we can’t say how this messes up the calculation because we don’t even know which emissivity they used to calibrate the camera with (unless they mentioned it somewhere – but I couldn’t find it). IR cams don’t magically know the temperature of the objects they’re pointed at. You have to either enter an estimation of the emissivity or calibrate against a contact measurement or reference emitter – and even then you couldn’t know how it changes over a range of temperatures. So whatever the coating is – a calibration would have solved all those issues.
Assuming they’re faking this on purpose (and of course you’re right – that is not far fetched at all) they could have done it this way. Or simply faked the readings – or used a different optics than the camera thought they were using, or… thousands of possibilities.

123star

September 9, 2012 at 5:20 pm

@Jami
If an IR camera gets the peak wavelength, you can compute the temperature using Wien’s displacement law. This works only if the emissivity coefficient is sufficiently constant along the IR spectrum so it doesn’t displace the measured peak. You don’t need to know the absolute value of emissivity, you just need to make sure that the emissivity doesn’t vary too wildly in the IR spectrum range.
Anyway, you’re right, the IR camera should have been calibrated.
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Of course, there are many ways to fake the results, I am just trying to guess the most obvious one.

Can’t comment on the emissivity issue since I don’t even understand where the reaction is supposed to take place and where the heater is located.

Strange to hear that. Heave you read the report? Have you seen photos inside?
Sure, I agree that calibration could be useful but how can you say “unless, of course, there is no reaction anyway” when the power output, calculated in a very conservative way (without considering thermal convection and assuming the inner surface at the same temperature of the outer surface), is 2-3 times the electric power input?

“Admin”
I am sorry but I cannot agree with your statement – “I see no reason to doubt their integrity or expertise.”

There is a lot in that series of documents to question that statement.

Here is just one.

The report was presented as a professional report by 2 engineers. (Ignoring the radiation parts that are just for show, because nothing is going on that would produce radiations anyway). It is clear that their original report was not a report of tests performed by industry and scientific standards, or the other report on the “corrections” would not have been needed in the first place.

The “correction” document has no name of the author, and looks like it was written by a different person/s. If the “corrections” document was written by the first 2 engineers why didn’t they just revise their original document before giving it to anyone?

There are also many problems in the first report still not addressed by the “corrections” document, that clearly shows their lack of professionalism in the testing procedures and analysis. More on this later.

Even so (and I have my reservations, too) I am not ready to take potshots at them. We did not have this data last week. It is something tangible to work with. That is a step forward.

I did wonder why they did not simply alter the report. You assume a negative reason but it could also be a reflection of integrity. We just don’t know. I do agree that many questions remain and arise from the report – you may be correct. For these reasons and more, I await you and others commenting but ultimately expect that we’ll resolve little until we get (or not) validation from one or more universities.

I did wonder why they did not simply alter the report. You assume a negative reason but it could also be a reflection of integrity.

Integrity is not a word I would associate with Rossi.

For a potential revolutionary discovery of this magnitude, we shouldn’t be relying on anyone’s integrity.

It does appear that the only independent testing (assuming he is telling the truth about SGS) only “proves” that there is no nuclear reactions going on.

According to Rossi’s own paper(s) on the subject, his reaction is supposed to produce 2 511keV gamma rays for each atomic reaction.

Given that he is doing this in a metal tube with a hole in it, his new E-Cat would make a wonderful death-ray. It’s a wonder anyone survived the testing!

Of course, Rossi has decided to just drop all that awkwardness about transmutation and gamma rays, because keeping it would make it hard to convince anyone that he’s ready to start making huge profits for his “investors”.

Despite the pony shows, despite the bad accents, despite the multi-interpretable texts, despite the conmen surrounding Rossi, despite the disputable reputation of Rossi, despite the lengthy period the drama needs to unfold, despite Rossi’s frequent usage of CAPITALS……the man is the real deal.

There are only trivial quick wins for him if it indeed is a scam. He is clearly all in….and only delusional people or people who do not know the rules of the game go all in if they not at least have a good hand of cards…Rossi is neither.

Don’t worry about transmuted Copper, don’t worry about the Gamma rays (not just a nasty nuisance, but the very process that supposedly generated the heat as the lead “shielding” absorbed them).

It appears that he went to the trouble of having tests run both by an accreditation body and a local faculty member of UniBo (but acting independently) to certify that there is no signs of nuclear processes going on. The fans, of course, consider this as proof that nuclear processes are going on.

He then self-published a report, using really bad methodologies and claiming a very modest COP of about 2.

He claims to have secret universities testing and verifying his gadget, but poor old Rossi can’t tell us about it because of NDAs. Of course, if there are any NDAs, it was Rossi who must have insisted on them. When you hire a University or accreditation organization to test gadgets for you, you get to set the terms about the test results.

I do recall that UniBo made it clear that they would not do “secret” testing for Rossi; that they insisted on openness. So I guess we can rule out UniBo as one of the “secret” universities. I’m sure Rossi could find groups willing to keep his testing secret, although he may have had to shop around to find them.

Aris is student at NTUA ? Or he is assistent ? When I was 13 years old, I had too wild hypothesis

John Milstone

September 9, 2012 at 9:03 pm

I’m just basing my opinion on the statements of Professor Christos Stremmenos, Former Ambassador of Greece to Italy, who pointed out HERE that John Hadjichristos is a vendor of food and beverages, and Aris Chatzichristos is a student.

What kind of calculation is this? Unwarranted prepositions about radiation of inner surface, with no radiation of cilinder bases and losses due to convection taken into account! It’s a total mess with errors about +/- 100%. Some reasonable conclusions could be made only by comparing temperatures of blanks and active devices.

Well, neglecting bases and convection and pipe-air conduction too, is ok because this reduces the estimated power output.
In the “corrections” slides, which are much clearer than the rest of the reports, they address some of these issues. They acknowledge that the inner surface must not be included in the radiating surface, of course.
What they are faking, in my opinion, is the paint emissivity coefficient as I said earlier

Re Steorn: “as far as I can now tell, the company’s claims were nonsense.”

Surely you don’t need to qualify that, 6 years and many millions of wasted Euros later. Let’s be clear – Steorn is and always was a combination of scam and self-delusion.

Just their original story about being a dot com that went from building web sites to making microgenerators for remote ATMs (which is where they discovered their alleged breakthrough) was ridiculous enough. There was never any evidence for any of it, but they dragged it out for years, and are still finding fresh investors for their new water heater scam.

“Admin”
Instead of shutting down your site, (which is what the Rossi disciples want), which is one of the best concerning Rossi, why not just start banning the worst offenders, instead of just using the “light touch”?

I don’t really want to hover over people with a ruler ready to rap their knuckles. It is insulting and I have better uses for my time. Running a technical blog with a high-comment rate in a controversial field is time-intensive and eats into my writing (I’m working to publish my latest novel within the next 6 days).

Ultimately, I do not want to run something mired in negativity. I am trying to do something positive for the community and get a little frustrated when adults act like cruel children.

That said; you are correct in what needs to be done. I will give the eCat until Rossi delivers (or not) on his university promise before taking a decision. Thanks for the thoughtful post.

Congratulations on your new novel! And, thanks for all of the work that you do on this site. I really think that at least some of these viciously negative people that comment here must be in the pay of vested interests. Otherwise, why would they bother to keep coming back over and over again with snide, cheeky, rude, dismissive commentary, as though they could just kill the project by being nasty about it. Surely, they must have better uses of their time. Seems to me that progress with the e-cat is coming along fine, although we would of course wish it were faster.

Reading these blogs is like smoking crack. Addictive but without any benefit. We know as much today as we knew after Rossi’s October 2011 test. What we knew then and know now is that Rossi is making claims but that there has been no verifiable third party substantiation. We know hardly anything about the scientists & engineers who wrote the report. We don’t know who they work for (Rossi?). We have no idea of their independence. Their methodology is difficult to follow. It would have been so much easier to heat (but not boil) water and measure the mass flow and temperature change. They only show 8 hours of data. Most of the skeptics who post in these blogs are not pathologically negative (or part of a conspiracy to discredit LENR). They just see a suspicious pattern of behavior on Rossi’s part. Tests with holes, performed for too short a period of time by people whose credentials and independence are unclear.

I took a brief look at the hot cat report. It’s a bit like the “how many things are wrong with this picture” test. JKW and 123 pretty much nailed it. 1. You can’t add the areas of the two cylinders. Only the radiation to room ambient matters. 2. You can’t take an average temp. You have to perform an integration. 3. Emissivities of various paints and surface materials can vary by orders of magnitude. You can’t just assume a number. You have to measure it. 4. There is an admission of “discordant” power measurements, but no mention of the degree of discrepancy. If there are high frequency components to the power, measuring voltage and current with off-the-shelf meters and multiplying the result will not in general give the right answer. Discordant measurements are a clue to check things out with a good, high bandwidth power meter.

But the main thing that would merit this a fail grade in any sophomore physics lab is the lack of a calibration. There’s a basic rule to performing good experiments: Make as few assumptions as possible and as many crosschecks as possible. In this case, the way to answer the above criticisms is to calibrate the system using a “blank”, i.e. with the heater coil alone, over some range of temperatures and prove that power measurements, temp measurements, emissivity measurements are all consistent when applying SB radiation law.

Admin is correct in his reservations. And to Knoert, this has nothing to do with not having been taught LENR in high school. But it does have something to do with being taught elementary physics.

Well, as the two-day Rossi extravaganza draws slowly to a close, we can take stock of where we are. As Bruno said a while ago, we are exactly where we were 11 months ago.

Let’s be analytical about all this. The Rossi conference was clearly not intended to change anybody’s mind. It was an event to satisfy the needs and requirements of the invited attendees. Obviously, we don’t know what those needs and requirements are, so it is pretty pointless to speculate. The main point is that Rossi clearly has zero interest in convincing the unconvinced about what he is doing.

The endless squabble on this website is over the explanation for that undeniable fact. There is absolutely no doubt that if the ecat is legitimate in any of its growing number of manifestations, it is completely within Rossi’s power to prove that to the world. And yet, he chooses not to. And thus those who are following the story fall into two camps: those who attribute this to fraud and sham on Rossi’s part and those who attribute it to some mixture of paranoia and clever business strategy on his part. Which is it? We don’t know and, at least for the foreseeable future, we won’t know.

Those of us who watch this circus in the blogosphere come away from this weekend’s event with our positions firmly entrenched. Rossi believers are busy declaring victory based on more inputs from the sole source of information. Skeptics are busy pointing out new incongruities and evidence of scamming. All in all, it is just more of the same. All that has been accomplished is yet another reset of the doomsday clock. It is very clear that Rossi should have clear sailing at least for a few more months among the inconsequential acolytes on the internet. More importantly, he probably has clear sailing for quite a while with the people that really matter to him and who attended his gathering.

I don’t know if Paul is really near the end of his rope with ecatnews. I don’t see why he should be. This ceased to be a website about Rossi and the ecat at least six months ago. It is really a place where there is an ongoing argument about the relationship between the investigation of LENR and whether it is a genuine new physical phenomenon and the extraordinary claims of a few individuals that leapfrog that very real question.

It is unfortunate that so much of the conversation consists of skeptics accusing believers of being fools and believers accusing skeptics of being evil and narrow-minded. This is the outcome of having only hearsay and poor-quality information to work with. It is also the outcome of being distant bystanders of an event we only have limited access to (I mean the whole business, not the seminar). But mostly, it is the outcome of people liking to choose sides and fight about things.

So, for the time being, we should enjoy our bar fights until Paul loses his patience entirely.

JN, a pretty good summary of the thing! I personally would be disappointed if Paul shuts this down, since the (sometimes heated) exchanges here make it a bit more interesting than most of the ecat fansites.

There are folks here who attempt to bring new info into the picture and who bring up interesting discussion points from all sides of the debate. Those who object to this type of exchange should probably hang out elsewhere. Somewhere out on the web there’s probably the perfect site for everyone. And if not, there’s always the possibility of creating one’s own site.

Jay2011 hit the nail by listing the faults of the experiment. No references, no variances on measures, environmental factor dependent study, incorrectly aligned IR camera and events within the experiment affecting the very parameter being recorded. As this was only an 8h recording and the setup looks neither complicated or expensive, for the bases of a public report, why did they not give it another try and repeat the study, fixing the flaws? Very unconvincing report.

Fraud, crowd control or bad engineering is impossible to say. If the experiment is not a fraud, the only logical explanation why Rossi keeps releasing incomplete evidence of the effect is that he is doing this on purpose as he wants to warm up the audience but wants more time before hell brakes loose like back in 1989.

Blah. Blah. Blah. SGS has certified the 1 MW industrial E-Cat and not one of you thinks this matters? I can’t keep up with your constantly shifting demands, because you keep changing the goal posts. What is it that you want? Siemens AG is working with the Hot Cat, verified by UNIBO scientists, to produce electricity. Now you claim the UNIBO scientist’s verification just isn’t good enough for your exacting standards. They are not “independent” enough. Or American enough. Or “English” enough. I really honestly and truly, do NOT get you guys. I don’t understand what you expect from Rossi. He’s an entrepreneur, not a scientist. He doesn’t play by your rules, that much is obvious. So why expect him to? He’s not going to give you whatever it is you want. It isn’t happening. So, you’re going to have to be satisfied with SGS, and Siemens, etc. And UNIBO. Paul should shut this page down. It’s annoyingly stupid as far as I’m concerned. The vast majority of the skeptics’ comments are retarded and extremely childish. Write your book and shut it down. You are just impeding social progress, giving these idiots a forum in which to spew their propaganda.

The question is what YOU want. According to what you probably mistake for logic, the e-cat must now finally be proven as being the real thing, right? You probably thought that anyway. So go out and celebrate. Don’t hang out here. It’ll only frustrate you.

believing in Rossi as an ‘abstract concept’ is one thing – doing real actions based on that is another. You believe Rossi is real? How far would you go? Call someone among your family/friends ‘i got news for you. latest conference in switzerland finally proved that LENR is true. There even is a product on the market. It provides energy for heating. go to the bank asap, get a loan and buy one. cold canadian winter is coming soon and energy costs are at all-time high.’
would you do that? think this to the end – what is the most likely result – a thankful call next year ‘that was the best idea you ever shared – you saved the planet’ ? – or a blue container acting as a (very expensive) storage shed for gardening tools??

<Blah. Blah. Blah. SGS has certified the 1 MW industrial E-Cat and not one of you thinks this matters?

Not yet.

Firstly, Rossi has a history of lying about his relationships with legitimate businesses in order to “borrow” credibility. We have to wait for SGS to issue a report to believe that it really happened.

Secondly, Rossi was apparently careful to make it clear that he did not have SGS certification, but rather that they performed a limited test to determine that there was no dangerous radiation being produced by an E-Cat during normal operation.

No radiation is consistent with the fraud hypothesis, but it is not consistent with the LENR hypothesis. Remember that Rossi and Focardi claim that they are fusing Nickel into Copper, which by necessity would produce lots of gamma rays. In the older E-Cats, there was (supposedly) a lead shield. This lead shield wasn’t just a safety measure, it was the mechanism that actually produced the heat (by absorbing the gamma rays and converting them into heat).

Note that this new E-Cat not only has no lead “shield”, but it has a hole in the side. The amount of gamma radiation that should be leaking out of that hole (if LENR were really occurring) would cook anyone in the vicinity very quickly.

To believe Rossi’s new E-cat, you have to accept that everything he did last year was a lie.

” The vast majority of the skeptics’ comments are retarded and extremely childish” Funny, that’s what I think every time I see your name on this site. And then I remember you claim to be Canadian and get all red with shame…

Admin, do keep this site running as long as you need to be able to complete your novel, that way something will have come out of it all. Thanks for that!

If SGS has certified the e-cat Mr Rossi would certainly show an image of the certificate. If you look at an CE certification made by an notified body a lot of things is specified/mentioned. I often see CE certificates for appliances under the EU Gas Appliance Directive.

Now I am totally mystified – not by the reaction itself but by the whole thermodynamics of it. If reaction is driven by heat and produces only heat, then it must be self-sustained, at least as long as initial conditions hold. COP over 1 is possible if you put one form of energy in, and get the other out, but if you put in only heat, you can’t multiply it.
To put it differently, if you stimulate generation of heat by some other form of energy (light, electricity, chemicals, whatever), you could sustain the reaction, but if heat-generating (exothermal) reaction is started by heat, it must be self-sustained at least as long as the loss of heat does not top its production. But Rossi’s device (as well as Celani’s and Bruillon Energy’s ones) seems to produce heat only as long as the heat is inputted from some external source, irespectible of the rate of its loss. It sounds as if matter has the means to differentiate between this “imported” and its own “homespun” heat – a strange thing even to contemplate!
If the effect is real – and it seems that it is – then there is something much bigger than “anomalous heat production” waiting in the wings. Such “heat multiplication” could be explained only by postulating:

a) That the heat produced by eCat (and similar devices) is a heat different from the heat produced by conventional sources; in fact that there are two kinds of heat;

b) That electrical current (and even gas burner) delivers to eCat some other form of energy in addition to pure heat (i.e. an energy till now invisible to instruments), and that this energy is only transformed in the Rossi device, or that it at least stimulate something that happens in hydrogen-sucking metals.

It could in the end pane out that “cold-fusion” is no fusion at all and that LENR have nothing to do with nuclear transformations. Once again in the long history of science the Nature could step on the side of prudence – i.e. on the side of researchers who opted for the term “anomalous heat generation”.

“That the heat produced by eCat (and similar devices) is a heat different from the heat produced by conventional sources; in fact that there are two kinds of heat;”

And not only that – the two kinds of heat would be completely incompatible and could, by no means, be converted into one another – yet a thermometer wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them. I only hope my wife won’t be either. I’ll be in trouble when I start heating the house with an e-cat and it won’t be the kind of heat she needs to avoid freezing her b*tt off.

Once we are done deconstructing thermodynamics, we can move on to several other disciplines and pretty soon we will be all set to redo all of physics to account for Rossi’s innovations. This should be great fun!

I think your fundamental question is: “If it requires a certain temperature to initiate and sustain a “reaction”, why can’t the system be run in self-sustain mode, i.e. without input electrical power to the heating coils, once that temperature is reached?” I haven’t heard any good answer why this should not be the case. Running an ecat in self sustain mode for a long period of time would silence a lot of critics very quickly.

As to your questions regarding heat, no there are not two kinds. But it’s not a dumb question. Heat and temperature are actually quite difficult concepts to describe in a rigorous and formal sense. It took the brilliant physicist Ludwig Boltzmann most of his life to do this as he developed the ideas of statistical mechanics. And some of his ideas were quite controversial at the time. BTW, Boltzmann eventually was driven mad and hanged himself.

Running an ecat in self sustain mode for a long period of time would silence a lot of critics very quickly.
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Two answers.
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One, runnin an ecat in self sustain mode is like running a forest fire in self sustain mode. Once it gets going hot enough to run on its own, it doesn’t stop until it runs out of forest – or something critical in the ecat succumbs to the heat. Someday the technology will allow self sustain mode, but it is not a simple problem to solve.
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Two. Rossi has no business reason to silence the critics. If GE had invented this technology, we would not know about it until we saw the TV ads for their products. Rossi did not have the budget to do that. He had to let some information out to get enough people interested to start his business. He is better off if the rest of the world remains ignorant while he continues his research and development and achieves a head start.

The only thing Rossi is achieving with his bad measurement methods is that even formerly ardent believers are starting to doubt as you can determine from perusing the Vortex email list and the comments at Sterling Allen’s usually wildly optimistic site. Also, even Frnk’s acolytes at E-cat World are starting to doubt. Doubt is the new believe when it comes to Rossi.

Paul

September 9, 2012 at 9:00 pm

It does not matter if ardent believers doubt him or not. He is not selling anything to them.

Paul, I don’t understand your statement about self-sustain mode. If the ecat requires an input of heat in order to operate and the thing generates excess heat as its output, then some of that heat can be used as the input. Heat is heat. Or does the ecat “know” that it was the source of the input heat rather than a resistor or a gas flame? If it takes a certain heat flux to drive the thing, then why does it matter where that comes from?

Paul

September 9, 2012 at 8:59 pm

Heat is not heat.
Temperature matters.
The temperature of the heaters is quite a bit higher than the temperature of the ecat at operating temperature.

JNewman

September 9, 2012 at 9:07 pm

Ah, so the forest fire analogy is not relevant. The problem with self-sustain is not the danger of runaway, it is that the ecat doesn’t get hot enough to drive the reaction so it just won’t work. That’s an entirely different issue. So which problem is the real problem?

@Paul (is this Paul Stout?)
But there was no control loop turning down the input power to the heating coil in any of the demos. So here’s a better analogy. Somebody left the stove on and a pan of oil caught fire. Yes, it will probably continue to burn until the fuel is consumed. I’m suggesting to turn off the burner and show that this is the case. But you say I should leave the burner on or else the fire could get out of control?

Paul

September 9, 2012 at 9:13 pm

yes, this is Paul Stout
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There is a cooling system that can keep the ecat cool enough to prevent overheating, but only if the reaction does not exceed some unknown power output and reach the ignition temperature thoughout the core. In the absence of that runaway power output, the heater supplies the temperature necessary to initiate and keep the reaction running.

JNewman

September 9, 2012 at 9:26 pm

Paul, Is the underlying hypothesis here that the vintage ecat with its 100 degree output, the 600 degree ecat and the hot cat are all based on the same phenomenon, or are there a bunch of different new physical processes that have been sequentially discovered by Rossi? And is this the same phenomenon observed by Celani and others? This is an important question because you claim that the ecat doesn’t get hot enough to act as its own driving heat source. If so, then are you saying that the 100 degree reactor requires more than 1200 degrees at the injection point to run? And is this in any way consistent with any reports results or descriptions?

I remain quite puzzled by the plethora of seemingly incompatible requirements on LENR reactors not to mention the presence or absence of radiation and/or transmutation. Either there are all kinds of seemingly unrelated phenomena being observed or there are a whole lot of erroneous reports. Which one is the “real” LENR? Or at least, what version of this are you assuming in making your arguments?

Jay2011

September 9, 2012 at 11:12 pm

@ Paul,
So with the cooling loop active, the heating coil can bring up the temperature locally within the sample to initiate and sustain a reaction, but once that local section of material starts “burning”, putting out heat energy in roughly the same locale at a rate six times higher than the electrical heater alone, it cannot self sustain if the electrical coil is turned off? It is difficult to envision a geometry or a reaction physics/chemistry where this would be the case.

Whether your argument is that of the out-of-control forest fire or the sputtering pan of oil that can barely stay lit, I’m having trouble understanding it.

the ractor is stable only if you tune it in a position where cross-section is reduced if temperature increase

today we know that if there were not the “delayed neutrons”, it would be unstable because heating would be too slow to stop chain reaction.

hopefully some neutrons get late, so late that temperature have increase.

also negative retroaction is not always true, some tuning lead to positive retroaction, like in Chernobyl.

the trick of DGT is probaly to have those delayed heat.

Celani results show first that there is a heat activation that is enough to cause positive retroaction. not new, it was observed in first electrolysis experiments, more efficient if near boiling.

Selond celani observed that electric activation is more efficient than heat.

DGt first increase to reach a point not too far to chain-reaction
DGT use pulse of plasma and polarization to start the reaction.
However when it stop the reaction continue, but probably some delayed effects happens later (radioactive decay), and instantaneous closed loop might be frankly slowly down, but late decay make it nearly self sustain… the total not too unstable at short term, yet nearly self-sustain on medium term…

A classic control loop tune the frequency and pulse length, so that the longterm produced heat is what is expected…

In a real world (not the surrealistic Matrix simulation that we seem to be stuck in), were this NiH reaction everything that is claimed, there would be all kinds of groups studying the thing, determining exactly what the reaction was, what was being consumed or transmuted, what the reaction output channels were as a function of temperature and other parameters, what the physical mechanisms were for triggering the thing, etc. In other words, all the physics that determines how the reaction is initiated, sustained and stopped. One would need to develop, at the least, a very good empirical engineering model for the thing that could be verified in all kinds of intended and unintended operating modes. More likely, one would actually need a physical model in order to understand all of the parameters at play. Then, after years of study, one could have confidence that the thing was safe under all conditions, could not enter into harmful radiation modes, did not leave a bunch of radioactive waste in its tracks, could not run away, could be reliably stopped and started, and appropriate control loops put in place to moderate output power. You are correct, appropriate control loops will depend upon the physics involved, e.g. how is energy released, via phonon transfer, via low energy gammas, via other low energy radiation? What feedback mechanisms are in place.

All of this would need to be accomplished to make a safe product that could be sold to consumers. The task is really quite large, and a few orders of magnitude beyond any one person’s capability.

OK, I now have a new hypothesis about what Rossi is doing. He is systematically mis-measuring ALL his experiments. I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s deliberate,

It started with Levi’s 130kW “surge” and 15 kW from a tiny ecat. That one probably was due to bad placement of the thermocouple, too near the heater or in contact with it.

Then, Rossi fooled the Swedes with wet steam instead of dry. That’s just the right error to get a COP of 6.

In the experiments of October 6, 2011 with the larger ecat with the heat exchanger, he again misplaced the thermocouple for output temperature too close to the hot end of the heat exchanger manifold.

And now, he misstates the emissivity as 123 pointed out. So the device is more insulated (if you will) than Rossi’s calculations allow for. Depending on where he measures the surface temperature, that can make it seem as if more heat is exiting it by radiation than really is.

An additional piece of evidence: Rossi has never provided or allowed calibration of the entire measurement system. But each ecat has had a built in electrical heater that would make such a calibration simple and fast. Rossi has never made a blank run. That would be easy too by leaving out the hydrogen. Rossi had easy ways to verify the proper performance of the measuring system but he has never done so even though it is obvious, fast and cheap. He’s been asked to do so many times, in such places as the Vortex list and also on his own blog. His excuses for not doing that have been self serving, unconvincing, and bizarre.

The most likely reason that Rossi has never run any blanks and calibrations of his measuring system is that it would show that those systems are over-estimating the output energy by exactly the COP claimed for that particular system. I suspect that Rossi has carefully built such mis-measurement in each system and further, that he has tested it to make sure it works properly to mislead the people who help him with the experiments.

I don’t think Levi, Kullander, Essen, Lewan, and maybe even the current engineers are necessarily dishonest. It is enough that they not be cautious enough and that they be very motivated to see this work and somewhat gullible.

OK, I now have a new hypothesis about what Rossi is doing. He is systematically mis-measuring ALL his experiments. I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s deliberate,
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Possible, but the number of co-conspirators keeps growing, which raises the odds against it.

No co-conspirators necessary. Just gullible people. However, whoever “Cures” is probably is a co-conspirator. He supposedly did the measurements for the October 28, 2011 megawatt power plant for a most likely fictional customer.

Whatever anyone sais on this site is simply a reflection of what’s in their own minds and this is an open forum by the way.

What’s wrong with people saying what they want, that is healthy and a more robust scope of a subject is then explored. Geeze has anyone been around yes people? Yes to everything and agree on everything, every nitpicking point is important in discussion because it promotes more interaction with more people on this subject.

I have read this site for over a year, in fact almost when it started and have yet to be offened. Everyone here posting has benefited this site and the uraveling of this saga, all words reflect back on the author, not the site.

So get it clear right now, Rossi had no more than words voicing what he believed would work eventually. Deal went South after Defkalion saw bigger bucks not going with Rossi but they sold him short thinking they could blow through this with their investment cash before he could get his capital to go forward with the plans he disclosed in a haphazard way to a cunning CEO of Defkalion.

“Rossi is not the creator of Nickel Hydrogen Reactions”, and niether is Defkalion.” Someone else will emerge with facts and evidence to support this someday, hopefully soon.

News broke from Italy on this Rossi saga and the claims were so far out that the U.S.scientists and other countries had to chime in to not get left in the dust, and humiliated by some small time independent inventor with a cockie attitude that blew through the most revolutionary discovery since oil.

There are now “several reports” per Vortex, that people have tried to purchase industrial megawatt plants and have been unable to do so. This is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Rossi is conducting an investment scam.

Latest person I saw claiming to have tried and failed to place an order for a megawatt heat plant is “patrik” on E-cat World:

“We have already ordered from Magnus Holm wich should be distributor in Sweden. And one should note that according to Rossi the 1MW plant was buyable one year ago, we ordered it then.

Perhaps we could take delivery now then, interesting. We should have several installtions up very soon then should this be true. I fear however that it isnt, there always seem to be something that hampers delivery.”

“I have tried. Just try to buy one 1MW plant and you will see.

I am on the board for a real estate owner, we need to heat 400 aparments in Sweden. And we have ordered and wanted one for a long time now. You can not buy one I assure you.”
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In this thread:

The test results are interesting and it is good that we have named engineers signing off. But some of the objections re calibration, emissivity and absence of dry runs seem to the point and need to be kept in mind.

More worrisome I think, is the absence (I think – I may have missed something ) of credible progress reports on the 1MW and the small domestic heater. Rossi should be able to supply convincing detail by now on both those.

Why with crappy independent testing not give him a cop of six or higher? Instead it’s 2
In my mind if u want more investment and fame I.E. money I think people know that this isn’t enough to be a viable energy source. Personally if I were him I would have fudged the results to bring in the big money. Maybe I’m just greedy! :)

“If this is a scam, it has to be one of the most complex techno scams of all time, given the amount of effort put into producing test reports and the like.”

I disagree. In terms of engineering and reporting, this is nothing. It is an amateurish, low budget effort. The entire report including the experiment has probably cost less that Rossi’s flight ticket to Zürich. The experiment consisted of two, painted steel cylinders and a heater. All in all we’re talking about $ 4,000. Most expensive was probably the IR Cam – and they chose the cheapest model there is (2,600 Euros). The report looks like is was thrown together on a slow afternoon by somebody who never used Word before.

Now before anybody accuses me of dismissing Rossi based on nothing but a cheap setup and an ugly report – my point here is, that this isn’t a “complex techno scam” at all. It is a very cheap, quick and dirty techno scam.

Imagine, that there is new guy coming from nowhere who claims to control a new process, which could change the status quo of the biggest markets of the global economy.
Imagine that the guy provides an open verification of his claims with major universities around the world.
How long it would take for this guy to just disappear, because he endangered the trillion dollars businesses … People got killed for much smaller amounts of money …

It seems to me that there is an obvious source for the excess heat that so often bathes Rossi and his E-Cat associates in its warm glow: their own endlessly fatuous emissions of hot air.

I am an inventor who has had to rely on financial backers and engineers to bring complex products to market. Had my thinking and calculations and prototypes and tests and communication skills been as painfully amateurish and inept as those of this bumbling bunch, my products would never have seen the light of day.

I am by nature a positive person, but with the best will in the world it is difficult to be polite about this ongoing farce — a farce that tends to suck us into its doubtful embrace because we so badly want it to be true. Alas, it is almost certainly not.